After Desert Storm

In a dispatch for Creative Time Reports today, Sylvia Plachy recalls working in Kuwait in 1991, in the aftermath of the first Iraq War. She came to the country as a staff photographer for the Village Voice. “The oil fires were still burning and would continue to burn for six months more,” she writes. “The acrid smell stung the eyes, and the petroleum fumes sucked the oxygen and light out of the air…. With furious, fiery tongues and the deafening roar of hell, the earth seemed eager to swallow us up.” Plachy photographed the damage in Kuwait City, Iraqi refugees in the Saudi desert, oil fires lit by fleeing Iraqi troops, and the destruction along the road that came to be called the “highway of death,” which connects Kuwait and Iraq. Twenty-three years after the beginning of the coalition-led air strikes, here is a selection of images from Plachy’s assignment.

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